The present invention relates to material employed in vehicles for panels including those used for impact absorption in the event of an accident.
A wide variety of materials have been employed in vehicles for panels such a headliners, door panels and the like. U.S. Pat. No. 4,828,910 discloses one such material. Behind decorative panels padding or other impact absorbing techniques are employed for minimizing injuries in the event of an accident. Although air bags are now becoming commonplace, areas of the vehicle, such as the A-pillars and the headliner, need to meet or exceed the federally mandated head injury criterion (HIC(d)) performance which will be required for such areas in future vehicles. In the past, a variety of open and closed cell foam materials have been employed for areas such as the instrument panel. In order to provide head impact absorption in contemporary vehicles, padded visors are sometimes employed as shown in U.S. Pat. No. 4,958,878 for protecting the occupants in the front windshield area.
In recent years, headliners for vehicles have been integrally molded and have a variable thickness depending upon the area of the headliner. In some instances, efforts have been made to increase the thickness of headliners in areas where impact absorption may be important. With such increased thickness, however, the cost of manufacturing the headliner through a molding process increases as does the complexity of the size and shapes of the molds employed. Further, modern vehicles do not allow space for a significant additional conventional padding or cushioning materials in view of the more compact interior design and sharply slanting windshield.
U.S. patent application Ser. No. 08/529,366 filed Sep. 18, 1995, and entitled HEADLINER WITH INTEGRAL IMPACT ABSORPTION PANELS represents one new solution to the problem in which corrugated material is employed in the headliner in critical areas where impact absorption is desirable.